Parisel, however, was not listening to them any longer.

He was terribly vexed at meeting with such a common-place adventure at the first start, and to come across that girl on his road, who would make him loose, and soil him with unclean love.  She would lower him, and bring him down to the level of rollicking troopers, who are welcome guests in houses of bad character.

“Well,” one of them said suddenly, “suppose we go and finish the night at that establishment; it will be far jollier, and the chief will not be obliged to cudgel his brains to remember the name of the girl he loves!”

* * * * *

The officers pushed open the door of the saloon, where a servant was lighting the chandelier, and Marchessy called out in a loud voice, and amidst bursts of laughter: 

“Here, Lucie!  We have brought your sweetheart to you!”

She came in first, slowly, and wrapped in a transparent muslin dressing-gown, and stopped, as if the beating of her heart were choking her.  The bandmaster did not move or say a word; he resembled a duellist, who sees his adversary advancing towards him and taking aim at him, and who is waiting for death.

Great drops of perspiration rolled down his face, and all the blood had left it, while the woman looked at him, and did not appear to recognize him, although her eyes wore a look of triumphant pleasure, and when he started back, and turned his head away, she said to him, in a mocking voice: 

“What, my dear, are you not going to kiss me, after a whole year? ...  I must have altered very much, very much indeed ...  Do not my mouth, and this mark by the side of my ear, bring something to your mind?”

And Varache, who had just lit a cigar, muttered:  “Are you going to act a play until to-morrow?”

Then Lucie threw herself on to a sofa, and with her chin in her hands, and in the posture of a chimera on the look out for the pleasures she wishes, continued gravely: 

“We lived at the end of a quiet street behind the cathedral, a street in which pots of carnations stood on the window ledges, through which the seminarists went twice a day, as if it had been a procession, and where I was bored to death.  Our parents’ shop was cold and dark; my mother thought of nothing but of going to all the services, and of attending the novenas, while my father bent over the counter.  There was nobody to pet me, to advise me, or to teach me what life really was, and besides that, I had the instinctive feeling that they cared for nobody in this world but my brother.

“The first kiss that touched my lips nearly sent me mad, and I had not the force to resist or to say no.  I did not even ask the man who seduced me to marry me, to promise me what men do promise girls.  We met in a booth at the fair, and I used to go to meet him every evening in a meadow bordered by poplar trees.  He had a situation as clerk or collector, I believe, and when he was sent to another town, I was already three months in the family way.  My people soon found it out, and forced me to acknowledge everything, and they locked me up like a prisoner who wished to escape from jail.